Young Charles Lamb!

Our book today is Young Charles Lamb, 1775-1802 by Winifred Courtney (a lucky break for Lamb, obviously: a biographer named Winifred will invariably be not only trustworthy but discreet).

One writer on Lamb summed him up accurately - at the same time throwing a spotlight on what's so different about this book:

Had it not been for Mary [his sister], age would not have fallen so suddenly and engulfingly upon him. Without her, we might be able to imagine Lamb as a young man rather than always picturing him as a smoky and eccentric oldish fellow, settled in both his habits and his singleness, whose youth had come to an abrupt end with his childhood.

That's the natural view of Lamb, the established East India clerk and revered author of the 'Elia' essays that brought him fame and income in the 1820s, and the aim of Courtney's biographical study is to blow some of the dust off that legendary figure by taking a close look at Lamb's early life, before and immediately after the signal event that blasted it apart.

A 21-year-old Lamb walked in on that event one evening when he came home from his job at the East India Company to find his older sister Mary standing over the dead body of his mother with a carving knife in her hand. The family - Lamb's old and senile father, his mother, his sister Mary and his aunt - had gathered at the table for supper, and something set Mary (who had often shown signs of insanity and even violence in the past) off. By the time Lamb walked innocently into the room, his mother was dead, stabbed through the heart, and his father was wounded, and his aunt was insensate with shock. It was Lamb who gently took the knife out of Mary's hands.

He swore that his sister would never go to one of the state-run mental hospitals that would certainly have been her fate without him. Instead, for the rest of his life he devoted himself to providing her with private care, even for the years when there was no money, when there was no help (when a 'bad time' would come upon her, the two would hurriedly pack her things - and her straight jacket - and go to whichever private care facility Charles could manage; the arrangement horrified his friends even while it also filled them with a kind of involuntary wonder at his steadfastness). The two had been friends before Mary killed their mother; after, they fell into the deepest of sibling bonds, sitting together on countless nights at the same work-table, Charles writing whichever piece was paying that week and Mary doing her best to help him. In all of English literature, it's easily the weirdest, most unaccountable authorial relationship of them all.

Courtney explores the roots of that relationship - she digs around all of Lamb's relationships, including the large correspondence he conducted with his best friend Coleridge ... indeed, one of the best pleasures of her very enjoyable book is the trove of letters to and fro she so liberally quotes; they give a feel for Lamb and everybody else that's a fascinating counterpart to the famous essays.

Since she's dealing with Lamb's unsettled youth, she's had to master a mountain of financial and clerical details, and she presents everything with a clear, weighing mind - she doesn't even succumb to the typical biographer's vice of universally praising her subject. Although Lamb dearly loved poetry and tried his hand at it for most of his life, Courtney is under no illusions as to the merits of the result:

After the period covered by this book Lamb gave up trying to be a serious poet, though (with Mary) he later wrote children's verse for money and would now and then drop into rhyme for comic or political or friendly purposes to the end of his life, even publishing more of it than was strictly wise (it is hard to give up an old love).

Despite this, the book is full of poets: obscure, owlish Wordsworth, beautiful, passionate Coleridge, stately, meticulous Southey ... and moving amongst them, storing up the voracious and eclectic reading that would later come to such glorious flower, was tiny little tobacco-addict Lamb, always listening patiently, always ready with that deceptively winning self-deprecation that would in later years make all his essays such endlessly charming and endearing little masterpieces:

My reading has been lamentably desultory and immethodical. Odd, out of the way, old English plays, and treatises, have supplied me with most of my notions, and ways of feeling. In everything that relates to science, I am a whole Encyclopedia behind the rest of the world. I should have scarcely cut a figure among the franklins, or country gentlemen, in King John's days. I know less geography than a schoolboy of six weeks' standing.

Courtney follows the young Lamb through all his various forays into journalism and the formative writing of literary essays; she follows him through the ever-expanding circle of friendships for which he always showed a singular appetite; and most of all she follows him through the ups and downs of his troubled guardianship of Mary's best interests. The result is a familiar portrait (less so the actual portrait on the book's cover, done of Lamb in 1804 by none other than William Hazlitt, before he abandoned painting in favor of writing): Lamb the rock, Lamb the ever-affable friend to all, Lamb the voice of sanity and balance.

But a portrait may be familiar and still be wonderfully done, and Young Charles Lamb is certainly that. It's not only a fascinating book in its own right - it's also a virtually indispensable companion to the 'Elia' essays and the other famous writings of Lamb's much later life. It's here you see the forces that shaped those later writings, and it's a great feat Courtney has done, explicating those forces so exhaustively, and so well.

Bible Study: The Book of Hosea!

Our text today is from the Book of Hosea:

When Yahweh spoke first through Hosea, Yahweh said this to him, "Go marry a whore, and get children with the whore, for the country itself has become nothing but a whore for abandoning Yahweh."

So he went; and took Gomer, daughter of Diblaim, who conceived and bore him a son ...

Hosea is one of the so-called minor prophets of the Old Testament (not really so minor, since God doesn't talk to just anybody, but nevertheless not in the big leagues where God actually gets chatty), and to him God gives just about the lousiest instructions He gives to anybody in the book: to make yourself a walking billboard, a living demonstration of how Israel isn't worthy of My love, act as My stand-in and go marry a faithless whore.

Of course Hosea has no choice but to obey (God is God, after all, He of the smiting and the afflicting-with-boils), but even so, he certainly musters some enthusiasm for the part. He instructs Gomer to name their first son Jezreel, a name which is meant to invoke God's intent to ruin Israel and end its reign (it would be like a father today naming his son "Chinese Debt"). And he instructs Gomer to name their second child "Unloved." And the third kid gets named "You're Not My People." So it's not just God who's ruining lives to make a point here.

The point is that Israel keeps straying from the steadfast compact with God (Hosea is the first to introduce the husband/wife metaphor for God/Israel - a metaphor that will get co-opted later on by the Catholic Church), and God's not happy about it, as the little book's verses make clear:

That is why, when the time comes, I will withdraw my corn
And my wine, when the season for it comes.
I will retrieve my wool, my flax,
That were intended to cover her nakedness;
So I will display her shame for her lover's eyes
And no one shall rescue her from my power.
I will lay her vines and fig trees waste,
Those of which she used to say:
"These are the pay my lovers gave me."
I am going to make them into thickets
for the wild beasts to ravage.
I will put an end to all her rejoicing,
Her feasts, her New Moons, her sabbaths,
And all her solemn festivals.
I mean to make her pay for all the days
When she burned offerings to the Baals
And decked herself with rings and necklaces
To court her lovers,
forgetting me.
It is Yahweh who is speaking.

No offense, but that final line surely isn't necessary: nobody in the Bible, Hell, nobody in all literature, has a worse (or more elaborately detailed) temper than Yahweh.

And the point? That despite Hosea's extreme bitterness at having a wife who strays from him (although she faithfully bears him children, she habitually falls back into her whorish ways, at one point even needing Hosea to buy her back into his household), he keeps taking her back (in defiance of Jewish law, even); that despite how faithless Israel habitually is to her God, despite how bitter He is about it, reconciliation is still possible.

That and, of course, that it really, really doesn't pay to be one of God's prophets.

a Penny Press update!

Just a quick side-note here, also from that 7 November issue of the TLS, regarding our old friend the Earl of Clarendon. Those of you keeping up with our book-ruminations here (meaning: nobody, apparently) will remember that a copy of Clarendon's great work True Historical Narrative of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England recently turned up in a book recycling bin in England. The TLS in reporting the story openly worried about the future life of Clarendon's work, both they and I feeling it would be a shame if it were finally forgotten by the reading public.

The report in the TLS drew a response from Martin Maw of Oxford University Press, located in Great Clarendon Street, Oxford:

Sir - I was very pleased to read that a copy of the work of Edward Hyde, the Earl of Clarendon, had been retrieved from a recycling bin. The suggestion that it's "in danger of being forgotten", however, is possibly wide of the mark. Anyone in Oxford can admire Hawksmoor's building in Broad Street, named after Clarendon and partially funded in its construction by money from the True Historical Narrative of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, which was home to the university press during the eighteenth century. Furthermore, anyone who wants to make an appointment to visit the Press museum at Oxford University Press will be welcome to see the first volume of the Narrative on display for themselves - as a great many visitors have done to date.

Well, that settles the question, doesn't it?

Clarendon's work is doomed. Melancholy news for a rainy Saturday.

The Signet Classic Poetry Series!

Writing about the Oxford World's Classics just now has turned my mind, somewhat predictably, to other book-series I've loved. It's not that implausible a leap: how books are published, the way they're packaged and presented to the reading public, forms a larger segment of how readers enjoy those books than I think gets credit. Certainly my own bookshelves are almost universally populated by not only the books I love most but the versions of those books I love most. If I didn't care about such things, if the only thing that concerned me was raw content, I'd have every Dover edition ever printed, and precious little else.

But invariably, the well-exercised love of books entails more than raw content. We come to like the way certain books feel in the hand, the way they look on the shelf, the way certain notes seem to answer all our questions in just the right way, or how certain abridgements seem to have all the good bits and none of the bad ones, or how the writer who pens the book's Introduction uses just the right tone, inviting but not fawning, collaborative but not condescending. Dozens of intangibles like these go into determining, for instance, which collection of Yeats we'll have, or what edition of The Pickwick Papers.

So it's entirely permissible that I'm thinking about book-series and recalling the ones I've particularly liked. And as Open Letters gears up for its January Poetry Issue, my thoughts naturally turn toward the innumerable volumes of poetry I've owned in my life. Not modern poetry, mind you, although well-meaning friends have been giving me volumes of it for decades - precious little of it seems to find purchase with me, but that doesn't mean I don't love poetry dearly ... and the series I find myself going back to again and again is the long-defunct Signet Classic Poetry Series.


These were solidly-manufactured white paperbacks printed in the 1960s on paper-stock slightly heavier than the norm (then or now) , featuring generous selections from the canonized poets of England and America (Marvell, Sidney, Spenser, Whitman, Milton, Keats, Shelley, etc). Each volume had a specially-commissioned introduction in which the master of ceremonies gave us an overview of the poet's life and times and, in the better attempts, a couple of good quips, as when John Hollander warns us of the "self-absorbed, sometimes drab lyrics" of the Arcadia of Sir Philip Sidney - a good phrase and maybe not entirely wrong about Sidney, who could go on a bit much in this vein:

Over these brooks trusting to ease mine eyes,
(Mine eyes even great in labor with their tears)
I laid my face; my face wherein there lies
Clusters of clouds, which no sun ever clears.

In wat'ry glass my wat'ry eyes I see:
Sorrows ill eas'd, where sorrows painted be.
My thoughts imprison'd in my secret woes,
With flamy breath do issue oft in sound:
The sound of this strange air no sooner goes,
But that it doth with Echo's force rebound,
And make me hear the plaints I would refrain:
Thus outward helps my inward griefs maintain.

John Arthos gets the thankless task of introducing John Dryden to what he had to assume would be an audience consisting largely of college students (there was a time, four decades ago, when you couldn't glance in any direction on any campus in the country without spotting one of these books), and he takes a straightforward approach:

Of all England's poets Dryden is the one for whom the manner of grandeur counts the most. He masters it in a hundred ways - in passion, in thought, in mockery, even in joy. He brings grandeur into the light of common day, and it is still itself.



He comments that poetic tastes have drifted away from such grandeur, and he openly laments the fact that this drift has caused Dryden to be down-graded in the poetic pantheon. "We have too often," he tells us, "disposed of as superior journalism what is in fact literature." He hoped for a Dryden revival, and of course so do I, but that forty years ago, and the general run of hipsters attending poetry slams are still in no mood for stuff like this, from Absalom and Achitophel:

Did ever men forsake their present ease,
In midst of health imagine a disease;
Take pains contingent mischiefs to foresee,
Make heirs for monarchs, and for God decree?
What shall we think! Can people give away,
Both for themselves and sons, their native sway?
Then they are left defenseless to the sword
Of each unbounded, arbitrary lord:
The laws are vain, by which we right enjoy,
If Kings unquestioned can those laws destroy.

And if Arthos had the tough task of trying to get his readers to give Dryden a chance, that's nothing compared to the feat John Donne editor Marius Bewley had before him! Dryden wrote about unfashionable topics with bell-like clarity; Donne writes about unfashionable topics (personal religious faith, than which there can be no less fashionable topic among today's themselves-obsessed young people) too, but he does it with triple-jointed, jagged-brained, almost unfollowable mental twists and turns. Bewley does his best to draft a modern analog:

The influence of T.S. Eliot's poetry on the morale of the young literary intellectuals of the twenties and thirties must have resembled, in certain respects, the stimulus that Donne's poetry provided for an impatient generation long since surfeited with Petrarchism and the poetic conventionalities of the earlier Elizabethans.


But nothing Eliot ever wrote compares to this, and this is Donne trying to be accessible:

Batter my heart, three-person'd God; for You
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new.
I, like a usurp'd town, to another due,
Labor to admit You, but Oh, to no end!
Reason, Your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love You, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth'd unto Your enemy:
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to You, imprison me, for I
Except You enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except You ravish me.

The series got one famous person to write an Introduction. This was W. H. Auden, and for reasons passing understanding, he chose the Lord Byron volume. Thus, for a dozen pages or so, the reader watches, slightly appalled, while a hoof-mouthed and splay-footed irresolute yearner prissily gossips and back-bites about a man who would have eaten him for breakfast and been plenty hungry by lunch. The result is interesting in the way only ghastly mistakes can be, as here, when Auden insinuates for the hundredth time that he, why he himself, might just be a better poet than his subject:

If I had to introduce Byron to a student who knew nothing of his work, I would tell him: "Before you attempt to read any of the poetry, read all of the prose, his letters and journals. Once you have read these, you will be able, when you come to the poems, to recognize immediately which are authentic and which are bogus.

You read something like that and immediately want to corner Auden and ask him which of his own poems are bogus ... but you don't dare, because he would certainly respond by attacking you, and that might damage the gardenia you just this morning put in your lapel. Fortunately, an immutable law holds that when a poet excoriates his betters, he'll always accidentally point the finger at himself, as when Auden gamely tries to figure out just exactly why Byron is so, well, limited:

Byron's aesthetic theories, like those of any poet, were in part a set of working rules to help him write the kind of poetry it was in him to write, and in part an attempt to justify himself for not writing the kind of poetry for which he lacked the talent.



It's all the more maddening because of course Auden the poet is hugely talented, although there's nowhere in him anything as quietly beautiful as this little Stanzas for Music bauble, composed by Lord Byron in an idle afternoon but virtually swimming with translucent serenity:

There be none of Beauty's daughters
With a magic like thee;
And like music on the waters
Is thy sweet voice to me:
When, as if its sounds were causing
The charmed ocean's pausing,
The waves lie still and gleaming,
And the lulled winds seem dreaming
And the midnight moon is weaving
Her bright chain o'er the deep;
Whose breast is gently heaving,
As an infant's asleep:
So the spirit bows before thee,
To listen and adore thee;
With a full but soft emotion,
Like the swell of Summer's ocean.

There's a great deal more to savor in the collected Signet Classic Poetry Series, but alas, the whole run is out of print. Luckily, the books that flooded those campuses (each with a gorgeous, stately cover illustration) now show up regularly in used bookstores (somewhere out there are my Shelley volume and my Milton volume, both having unaccountably vanished from my shelves over the years), ready for you to give them a try.

In the Penny Press - the TLS!

I get looks whenever I buy the TLS, and not just because I'm a stone-cold super-hottie. No, I get cautionary looks from bookstore cashiers (never the brightest bulbs in any bookstore's chandelier - some of the older ones don't even know how to operate their own registers!), as though I might be unaware of just how staid and boring the periodical I'm trying to purchase is.

In a way, it's understandable. After all, the TLS isn't flashy, and one glance inside is enough to clue in just about anybody that what few pictures there are exist only as marginalia for what is a very large amount of prose. Page after page of multi-columned reviews in tight type, with no pie-charts and precious little in the way of multi-color graphics.

And partially, this appearance is accurate: the TLS is the world's most serious book-review organ. It's intellectually coruscating, temperamentally abstruse, and often Olympianly unanswerable. Most of its reviewers are distinguished academics and writers (this particular issue is in large part devoted to music, and the lead-off article is by none other than the brilliant, electric Charles Rosen)(as with most of the lead-off articles of the TLS, this one is worth the price of the periodical all by itself), and although they're usually chatty and helpful, they don't slow down for their audience. The tiny handful of people I know who claim to read the TLS universally skim it (and most not even that - back issues, dutifully bought, pile up on nightstands like autumn leaves), and that, too, is partially understandable: so much depth and detail, week after week, can feel oppressive to the perpetually over-leveraged.

I read the TLS from cover to cover (in an average issue, I entirely skip perhaps two pieces, on topics that hold no interest whatsoever, but even here I'm a bit ahead of the game as far as those skimmers go, since I don't subsequently try to pretend I read those pieces); I consume it. When you read as many books as I do, when you're as often frustrated with the book-reviews you read (and of course lately there's the fact that I write book reviews, not only here on a regular - if entirely un-commented-upon - basis, but also over at Open Letters) as I am, the TLS comes appears every week like a banquet from the gods.

But even so, it's easy to see how somebody unfamiliar with it could mistake it for being dry and dull. It looks dry and dull, but oh! It isn't. Intellectual and aesthetic probity of this magnitude is always exciting, but it's not only that - very often, the TLS is genuinely funny. Not slapstick humor, mind you, and sometimes rather droll, but still possessing a definite twinkle in the eye. The uninitiated find this impossible to believe, but it's true.

Take the 7 November issue, for instance. Yes, it starts off with the aforementioned long and stunningly good Rosen article on various styles of piano-playing, but very soon after that, the issue gets down to some serious one-liners and extended guffaws.

Well, maybe not very soon after that - there's a great but somber piece on the British in WWI, for instance, and there's a review of the new Coen Brothers movie Burn After Reading that, while not specifically funny, does have a wonderful line about how, like and The Hudsucker Proxy and O Brother, Where Art Thou? "the new film is boastful rather than apologetic about its own inconsequentiality."



But what about Tom Shippey's long, openly baffled review of the new monstrously unedited bagatelle from Neal Stephenson, Anathem? Shippey pretty clearly goes back and forth between being utterly nonplussed by the book and being vaguely disappointed both with it and with its intended audience:

Stephenson says there's no reason to read the chronology at the front of the book, "If you are accustomed to reading works of speculative fiction and enjoy puzzling things out on your own." (note that there are two requirements here).

If you give it a minute to settle in on you, that closing parenthetical is pretty damn funny, in an utterly composed, even cold way.

And then there's Nicholas Vincent, whose brief review of the new Bernard Cornwell historical fiction Azincourt (about the Battle of Agincourt - I must have been absent when everybody agreed to change the spelling) is so chock-full of malicious fun that I'm going to break with Stevereads precedent and quote it in its entirety. Enjoy:

Bernard Cornwell's cast of foul-mouthed military boors are here transported to the fifteenth century, with all the consequences of setting down Andy McNab, Jake "Raging Bull" La Motta, and Dr. Tourette in the midst of Little Arthur's History of England. There are so many intestines spilled "like wet eels sliding from a slit sack", so many pukings and involuntary voidings of the bowel, so many meticulously prepared cliches, that the reader is left wading in ordure, longing for a sentence of more than thirty words, for a word of more than two syllables, and for any reflective or descriptive passages not concerned with bodily fluids.


The plot of Azincourt is thin and cinematic. It involves Nick Hook, an archer whose one claim to fame is his ability to dispatch an incredible number of victims. Even before the battle proper, Nick has stabbed or bludgeoned to death nearly a dozen men, and this before counting the occasions when he strings his murderous bow. Within the first seventy pages, there are two gang rapes, from the second of which our hero clears his mind, somewhat implausibly, with "thought[s] of the badgers on Beggar's Hill". Thereafter, Hook (note the stabbing masculine monosyllable) makes off with the fair Melisande (remark the yielding and feminine anapest), and together they and their dysfunctional families bring various, not particularly interesting problems to bear on a story best summarized as "psychopath goes to war". The introduction to this plot of the lecher-priest, Father Martin, certainly increases the pornographic element, although Martin's claim to have met the Bishop of Oxford in a brothel staffed by nuns is either mendaciously boastful or miraculously prophetic: the bishopric of Oxford was not created until 1542, more than a century after Agincourt.

Cornwell's account of events is advertised as "supremely well-researched". Certainly it has involved him in reading at least three and possibly four works of serious history. Through their cool assessment of the battlefield and the campaign's rich documentation, the experts - among them John Keegan, Anne Curry, Juliet Barker and (not mentioned in Cornwell's acknowledgements) Christopher Allmand - have recaptured the horrid history of Agincourt with its slaughter in the sucking mud of Picardy. Cornwell, by contrast, so revels in the filth that one is left wondering whether, like several of his characters, not least the disgusting Father Martin, he is secretly celebrating what he seems to deplore. Fortunately, it is at this stage of that the events of October 1415 begin to gather pace. As French hubris thunders towards nemesis unleashed from English (and Welsh) bowstrings, and as we are once again told the old story, the reader can sit back, enjoy the show, and forget about the talentless actors who Cornwell has thrust, gurning and cursing, onto his blood-spattered stage. Grand-Guignol combined with didactic display of historical knowledge is, as ever, a formula difficult to resist. Homer knew this. Bernard Cornwell not only knows it, but has used it to sell a stack of books that would stretch from Troy to Agincourt and back.

Hee.

Mr. Vincent, there's a job waiting for you at Open Letters, should you be interested.

And in this issue of the TLS, as in any issue, the reader looking for chuckles will come to the last page with high expectations. That last page, in a relatively new and eminently sensible layout decision, now belongs to J.C.'s "NB" column, always an odds-on favorite for making you laugh out loud over your lunch of spicey Indian food. It's with mounting dismay, then, that the reader gets through three of J.C.'s four little items without cracking more than a smile. Even the last item, a brief, sarcastic review of a new book of apparently nonsensical statements called Oxymoronica, seems set to be well-behaved, although the book's compiler, Dr. Mardy Grothe, comes in for some apparently well-deserved ragging for over-explaining the items he's chosen:

... just as you are delighting in Emerson's claim "All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients", Dr Grothe pops up to prick your pleasure: "How can people from centuries ago steal ideas from modern thinkers? Of course they can't. This is Emerson's way of describing a fairly common experience." You don't say. But he does: in chapter after chapter.




We get a choice selection of oxymorons, from the likes of Thomas Mann ("A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people"), Samuel Goldwyn ("We pay him too much, but he's worth it"), and Josephine Baker ("I wasn't really naked. I simply didn't have any clothes on"), but by that point we're only lines from the end of the issue, and still there's been no capping zinger from J.C.

But then it comes, in the issue's very last line - a tart, memorably witty oxymoron to take home:

If you ignore the parts written by the author, this is a good book

Hee.

So you see, appearances can be deceiving. The TLS might look frumpy and humorless, but in reality, it's seriousness and learning need the regular release of zingers, kind and unkind. I quote a great philosopher: "The more advanced the civilization, the greater the need for the simplicity of play."

Oxford World's Classics!

Can we take a moment from the hurly-burly of our normal blogging to pause and praise the the heyday of Oxford World's Classics?

That heyday took place long after the establishment of the press at the start of the 20th century - and a large part of it is aesthetic, having nothing to do with the critical and scholarly issues that should be the only scratch-marks of any press. Nevertheless! In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Oxford World's Classics greatly expanded their line of titles and hugely improved their look - the spines and cover-backgrounds went from white to vibrant yellow, and the choice of cover-paintings greatly improved. It was a sight to see.

For a brief, wonderful interlude, your bookstores shelves were filled with these titles, often crowding out the frumpier-looking Penguin Classics. All the standard classics were here, from Homer to the Bronte girls, but there were lots and lots of stranger, less expected titles, from the Kalevala to Elizabethan prose works to seminal 'horror' titles like Dracula or The Invisible Man sporting movie-still covers. There was Austen and Dickens and Scott and Thackeray, and there was, for the first time, the whole of Musketeer novels of Dumas, and there was a splendidly-annotated collection of Sherlock Holmes, plus a generous helping of American classics.


And then there were the glories of the press: the extra-large Golden Bough, for instance, or the Annotated Bible (still far and away the best Bible to own), and what is surely the crowning achievement of the Oxford World's Classics of this period, the complete, gorgeously produced, exhaustively annotated run of Anthony Trollope.

The bindings weren't as resilient as Penguins, it's true, but the scholarly apparatus was often more current and sometimes more lively, and even when they weren't, the Oxford volume of virtually anybody made a worthy counter-balance to the Penguin.



And Penguin had the last laugh: in the mid-90s, they sued Oxford University Press for copyright infringement: that 'O'-shaped colophon on the bar with the word 'Classics' came too close, apparently, to the long-established Penguin Classics look. So the entirety of the Oxford line was pulled, at ruinous expense to the press. Trade-sized white-spined paperbacks of a fraction of their titles were put back on the market, but nothing like the old variety remained, and suddenly those vibrant yellow spines became collector's items when they were found in used bookstores. Certainly I keep an eye out for them, on the rare occasions when I enter a used bookstore!

So here's to a wonderful run, brief though it was! To Oxford World's Classics: for a while, they made yellow the most fun color in the bookstore!

In the Penny Press - part two!

The 6 November London Review of Books featured two stand-out pieces, one long, one short. The long one is a delightful ramble through the bloody mess that is Thomas Mann and his family, done with signature aplomb by Colm Toibin. As a reviewer and writer of fizzy prose, Toibin can do no wrong, and it's a testament to his talent that you're smiling all the way through this essay, even though the tale it tells - the rise of the Nazis, the exile of German intellectuals who didn't tow the party line, Mann the horrible, dysfunctional father (who both lusted after his young sons and emotionally disdained them), the inevitably screwed-up kids - is hardly a laughing matter.

There were many Mann children - wayward parasite and drug addict Klaus, strident and strong-willed Erika, well-meaning Elisabeth, passive and perceptive Golo, and the two youngest, Monika and Michael - but Toibin's story largely concentrates on Klaus and Erika (he's reviewing Andrea Weiss' book In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story, but even so, the tale couldn't have stressed things any other way) and their various pre- and post-World War II misadventures. Toibin seems a little charmed by the pair, although only a little:

Despite the fact that they often seemed in these years to be the silliest pair of people alive, they came nonchalantly and almost naturally to believe that their right to freedom and fun and half-baked opinions was something worth preserving.

Hee. That's as deliciously sharp as when Toibin refers to Klaus as the writer of "a few almost interesting books."

Klaus was a twit, certainly, and he spent his entire life in the shadow of his much more famous father (Toibin gleefully relates the reaction of his literary acquaintances in New York upon learning that he was going to publish an autobiography: "What will you call it? The Invisible Man? The Subordinate Klaus?"), but there's a pathos in the story nonetheless - this was an unhappy family very much being unhappy in its own way. Still, if Toibin's review is any indication, In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain could very well be worth getting from your local library. Unless the worth of the book has been deceptively represented by the fact that an Irishman wrote a fantastic review of it - that's been known to happen, so be sure to browse the book before you commit to it!



A book you can avoid with a clear conscience is the subject of the second bonny bit in our brief tour of the Penny Press today: Jenny Diski reviews Alastair Campbell's All in the Mind and proceeds to carve the book into tiny edible pieces. But as good as the point-by-point demolition of the review is, the concluding paragraph is soaringly better. Every single writer of fiction or would-be writer of fiction should read the whole of this marvelous paragraph every morning before they start writing:

There is no doubt that a lot of work has gone into writing this book. This is true of all novels, every damn one - eighty thousand words and more take a long time to write, and getting them in the correct order requires a good deal of effort. But though admirable in some Protestant sort of way, trying hard, even trying very hard, isn't quite enough if you can't write and lack wit. If Alistair Campbell wanted to write a novel about such a thing as people's lives coming alive, then he or his editor should have tried much harder to wrench the language away from the turgid and the thought away from the banal. The craft of fiction is not working out a plan that looks balanced on a spreadsheet and then clothing it with words. The trick about writing a good novel is to be a good writer, though I understand that many A-level students these days are assured that there is no such thing as good writing, or even good novels, only what readers like. That'll be the market. 'It'll only sell if it's good,' Campbell says. Or was that 'It's only good if it sells?' And there's that rabbit hole again.



(One side-note to all of this, as pointed to the first part as the second now that I think about it: Golo Mann, though not nearly as limelight-hogging as his older brother and sister, grew up to be a really fine, effortlessly readable historian, in many, many ways a better writer than his father. I doubt his various works of history are available in English, but if you should ever find any, give them a try ... you won't find the insane brilliance of Mann the Elder's best novels, but you'll find a good deal of worthwhile stuff in its own right).

In the Penny Press - part one!

A bit of nostalgia and a sobering warning in the Penny Press recently! It's the return of our old friend Edward Hyde, the first Earl of Clarendon (you remember him, right? He starred in his own post here not long ago, about which nobody at all left any comments at all), a beautiful gold-tooled edition of whose seminal work, True Historical Narrative of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, recently turned up in an Oxfam book recycling bin in England - as the TLS po-facedly puts it, this "suggests that Clarendon's work itself is in danger of being forgotten."

Clarendon's work has, indeed, been completely forgotten, which is a shame. But the point of note here isn't the book so much as where it was found: a catch-all charity bin! Some of our readers actually work at such catch-all charity bins, and I make no secret of the fact that I myself patrol them as often as time permits. Not so much for the collectible items - as some of you may know, I have little interest in that province of the book-world - but rather for the sheer unpredictability of the venue. When I'm digging through huge canvas tubs of piled books at the Salvation Army storage unit, I'm on a treasure-hunt of an entirely more secular kind, but no less wondrous for that.

Never come across a gold-tooled edition of Clarendon, although I doubt I'd buy such a thing in any case. A Penguin paperback of Clarendon, if such a thing existed, now that's a different story ...

Three on the Beach!

Our books today form a triptych of nature-writing united by a common scene: the Atlantic seacoast of North America, from Maine to the Florida Keys. This amazingly beautiful and diverse range has been attracting appreciative onlookers and trudgers and canoe-ers since humans first encountered it, and always it tends to bring out good, clear-headed, even flinty prose. The Pacific coast has its adherents too, of course, but its face is much more uniform than the Atlantic – there’s a lot less craggy individuality to attract craggy, individual prose stylists.

Our first book is The Edge of the Sea, the 1955 bestseller by Rachel Carson, whose Silent Spring kick-started the entire ecology movement. In The Edge of the Sea, she focuses exclusively on the intertidal world all along the eastern seacoast, the weird margin between truly-sea and truly-land. And as usual, her spare prose is deceptively poetic:

Tidal pools contain mysterious worlds within their depths, where all the beauty of the sea is subtly suggested and portrayed in miniature. Some of the pools occupy deep crevices or fissures; at their seaward ends these crevices disappear under water; but toward the land they run back slantingly into cliffs and their walls rise higher, casting deep shadows over the water within them. Other pools are contained in rocky basins with a high rim on the seaward side to hold back the water when the last of the ebb drains away. Seaweeds line their walls. Sponges, hydroids, anemones, sea slugs, mussels, and starfish live in water that is calm for hours at a time, while just beyond the protecting rim the surf may be pounding.

The pools have many moods. At night they hold the stars and reflect the light of the Milky Way as it flows across the sky above them.

As a longtime wader of tidal pools (sometimes to the consternation of my companions over the years), I can attest to their unending wonders, especially when you walk down to the beach at night (being careful not to come afoul of the skunks who invariably do likewise) and crouch next to such a pool long enough to see the various and wondrously strange activities that go on there. But then, Carson finds the wondrously strange in virtually everything she writes about, and she relays it all to her readers:

The ghost crab, pale as the dry sand of the upper beaches it inhabits, seems almost a land animal. Often its deep holes are back where the dunes begin to rise from the beach. Yet it is not an air-breather; it carries with it a bit of the sea in the branchial chamber surrounding its gills, and at intervals must visit the sea to replenish the water.

Our next book 1979’s The Wild Edge by amateur naturalist and seasoned journalist Philip Kopper, who likewise sets about exploring the entire eastern seacoast and the wildlife to be found there, including a puzzling species that congregates seasonally in vast numbers. Kopper is at a loss to explain the mating habits of this species:

There is no correlation between copulation and seasonal, meteorological, or temporal conditions, although mating commonly occurs at night. Despite their enormous numbers and reported frequent coupling, actual monozygous reproduction rates suggest high sterility. Sexual activity among individuals of the same gender occurs in highly localized sites. As many as 4,000 males have been observed massing on summer nights along one mile-long stretch of inner dune on Fire Island and engaging in inevitably fruitless behavior (there is no satisfactory biological explanation for this activity which is rare elsewhere in the natural world except among a few marine mammals like orcas and dolphins).

Rhetorical flights like this crop up regularly in multi-page bursts, and they alone are worth the price of the book (metaphorically speaking, of course – this book, like its two companions and most great nature-writing, is almost certainly out of print). Kopper is that best of naturalists: the kind who don’t suffer fools gladly:

But then the Red Cross also suggests [for victims of heat-stroke] that after undressing the victim the First Aider should use “a small bath towel to maintain modesty.” (Gentle reader, dear friends, passing strangers: if anyone ever finds me felled by heat-stroke and wastes any time on “modesty,” I’ll expire from apoplexy at such rank stupidity. Don’t worry about fig leaves in potentially fatal situations. If a spare cloth is available, use it as a sponge. Delay meaningful treatment too long and the victim will have a sheet over his head soon enough).

We go from such high spirits to more somber matter in our third title, George Reiger’s 1983 book Wanderer on My Native Shore, which, though full of good writing and fascinating biological tidbits, consistently strikes a conservationist tone similar to that found in Wildlife in America, and similarly depressing:

Although the Chesapeake still produces an average annual yield of 125 pounds of seafood per acre, every day approximately 400 million gallons of municipal sewage are dumped into it. And although more than 200 species of fish feed and spawn in the bay and nearly 75 species of waterfowl and waders winter on the Chesapeake, an average of 800 tanker oil spills occur each year, and deleterious chemicals from dozens of nonpoint sources increasingly infiltrate the bay’s ecosystem.

Reiger’s canvas is as broad as Carson’s and Kopper’s, although he concentrates on the Chesapeake more than the other two do (justifiably so, as any of you who’ve spent any time there will agree – Michener was right to devote 1000 pages to it, and there’s a great natural history book exclusively dealing with it, one whose title momentarily escapes me but which I read years ago with great delight). And, it must be said, he has an eye for the sadder details:

Yet, because Delphinus [delphis, a pelagic dolphin] is an offshore species, marine mammal colors rarely see its life colors. And because it lives, and therefore usually dies, far from land, relatively few Delphinus ever wash ashore for salvagers to work on. No more than an average of one Delphinus a year comes ashore between Maine and Florida, and that’s, perhaps, just as well. Watching a great whale expire on a beach is sorrow enough. Watching an animal electric with life and color yield its energy to the sucking sands can devastate the human spirit.

All three of these books come generously illustrated, as all good natural history books should, and all three ultimately celebrate the world of the waves. I’ve spent so much of my life walking, exploring, and just sitting and reading in that world that I couldn’t help but love these books, each in its separate mood. But even if you’re aquaphobic or landlocked or both, you’ll like them too.

Saints and Strangers

Our book today is Saints and Strangers, George Willison’s much-celebrated and hugely enjoyable 1945 best-seller about, as his droll period-subtitle informs us, “the Lives of the Pilgrim Fathers & Their Families, with Their Friends & Foes; & an Account of Their Posthumous Wanderings in Liimbo, Their Final Resurrection & Rise to Glory, & the Strange Pilgrimages of Plymouth Rock.”

Willison is at pains throughout his book to remind his readers that he’s talking about the Pilgrims not the Puritans, their straight-laced, humorless, and entirely less fun neighbors. He takes great joy in noting the difference, and indeed, his delightful book is based on that joy, on the remarkable robustness of his subjects:

They practiced no macerations of the flesh, no tortures of self-denial. They appreciated the pleasures of the table and of the bottle, liking both “strong waters” and beer, especially the latter, never complaining more loudly of their hardships than when necessity reduced them to drinking water, which they always regarded with suspicion as a prolific source of human ills. They were not monks or nuns in their intimate relations as their usually numerous families and more than occasional irregularities attest. Fond of the comforts of connubial bed and board, they married early and often and late, sometimes within a few weeks of losing a mate.

As his subtitle indicates, Willison concentrates a chunk of his book on the Pilgrims’ posthumous reputation, singling out the Victorian era as the time when they took on the schoolbook form in which most Americans currently know them. Willison is quick and consistent to point out how wrong this form is; “Far from being Victorians,” he writes, “they were children of another and a greater age, the Elizabethan …” Fortunately, the Pilgrims and their direct descendants left behind rather copious written records, so Willison is able to quote liberally from letters, official documents, and such weird and engrossing books as Of Plimoth Plantation by the insufferable priggish William Bradford, whose descendants have come to no good (including his eldest son, who, after many a false start in life, ended up in a godforsaken place called Norwich, Connecticut).

Life is the main gist of Willison’s narrative, the stress of how these brave, covetous, often clueless men and women who voyaged to America in the early 1600’s were living, breathing beings taking the greatest gamble of their lives. Willison clearly loves their bawling company:

Given to speaking their minds plainly, they expressed themselves in the language of Marlowe and Shakespeare, in the torrential and often rafter-shaking rhetoric of Elizabethan England, with no slightest regard for the proprieties and circumlocutions of a later day.

America in November 2008 has cause to think both of new hope and of voyaging to uncharted territories, and so Willison’s subjects seem more vital than ever. No better introduction to those subjects has ever been written (or seems likely in the future) than Saints and Strangers, and it’s had a long and very successful life as a book, so editions will be easy to come by (the one pictured, published by Parnassus many moons ago, is simply my favorite for aesthetic reasons).

Modern Ireland 1600-1972!

Our book today is R. F. Foster’s 1988 masterpiece, Modern Ireland 1600-1972, easily the finest history of modern and ever-so-slightly pre-modern Ireland ever written. Foster takes as his admittedly arbitrary starting point the year in which the great blowhard and bullshitter Hugh O'Neill made his march south down the island with the intent of sweeping the invading English forever from Ireland. O'Neill was the same Earl of Tyrone who the previous year had sat down across a makeshift table from the brash, youthful, and hopelessly stoopid Earl of Essex and, in a field of asphodel with songbirds chirping, fed Elizabeth I's gallant courtier - who'd been sent to Ireland to break Tyrone and wrap the country up in a pretty Tudor bow - such a line of codswallop that hardly a Sligo child of ten would have believed a word of it.

Essex was very good at believing unbelievable things, Elizabeth I less so - with uncomfortable results for Essex. He and his men roistered aplenty in Ireland, talked a great deal of revelatory talk, and even after the whole lot of them were recalled, refused to believe they'd been sold the sunrise by as good a talker as God ever made to stand upright. In his defense, Essex wasn't really concerned with Ireland or Irish politics - nor was Elizabeth, except as Ireland made for an easy back-door through which the Spanish could land mercenaries and equipment to harass her own state.

O'Neill didn't care much for Irish politics either, except for the fiscal policy by which money made its way into his pockets - but from time immemorial, that had always been sufficient motivation for an O'Neill to raise a rabble and call it the army of the Lord. And that's what O'Neill did, taking Spanish promises and marching south to meet the Queen's next emissary, a man named Mountjoy who had no poetry in him and consequently had an excellent ear for the crack of well-placed arabesques.

The resultant Battle of Kinsale in 1601 is hardly anything the Irish like to talk about, and Foster is right to draw a line there and call it the beginning of modern Irish history. It was at Kinsale that the idea of a free and separate kingdom of Ireland - something that could and would resist the incessant coveting pawing of England - was finally stuffed in a coffin from which it would only emerge, chastened and ill-fittingly sobered, centuries later. In between those two times, cheap sentimentalities and epic petty grudge-matches were planted like praties from Belfast to Dingle, and those sentimentalities have in one way or another managed to color virtually every Irish history ever written.

And how could they not? After all, it goes without saying that the only people who could possibly be qualified to write an Irish history would be themselves Irish - for is it not their story, and are they not reckoned the best storytellers in the world? But by the same token, if they're Irish all their history is both recent and extremely personal, and how can such things make a great, dispassionate telling? When my grandparents would begin an argument at the ancestral kitchen table, in English, about the electric bill, it would invariably end up (an hour later, at peak volume, in the Irish) being about the Battle of the Boyne.

Somehow Foster, despite being Irish, has managed it; Modern Ireland is entirely, even Olympianly dispassionate, watching all developments with equal, thorough attention, raising no ire anywhere, finding saints and blackguards among every persuasion on every side of every issue. Pretty much the only way you can tell he's Irish at all is because the book, despite being 662 pages long, reads like a great ravishing dream.



It's all here, the same familiar sad story, the same parade of usual suspects. The Tudors, the Stuarts, the black interregnum of Cromwell, the bumbling Hanover era, Home Rule, the brief age of Parnell, the Fenians, Robert Emmet, Daniel O'Connell, Michael Collins, the vile Eamon de Valera, the Duke of Ormond, Patrick Henry Pearse, the disgrace of Roger Casement, the Easter Rising ... and through it all, Foster is the same equable, plainly eloquent voice. He tells the story in big, careful strokes of his pen, and he's aided in making it a fluid story by a practice he adopts from the start and uses throughout: when his narrative first tosses up a new name, like a rock from underneath a plow, he keeps going and puts the necessary potted biography at the bottom of the page. The reader is thus filled in with all the pertinent personal details without needing to pause in their enjoyment of the story. Not only does this work as a way of keeping things running smoothly, but it it allows Foster to indulge in a little dry, humorous deadpanning in those little footnotes. They're like treats, scattered throughout an already-delicious text.

That text is everywhere excellent in its own right - as noted, this very long book reads with a beautiful smoothness, even when its reporting some grim thing indeed, like the stagnant nature of rural Ireland even well into the 20th century:

... much in 1930s rural Ireland would have been recognizable to a reincarnated Victorian traveller. Housing remained dominated by the single-storey cottage; living conditions were basic; families large; emigration and tuberculosis part of life. (The childhood memoirs of Noel Browne, later a revolutionary Minister of Health, provide a chilling first-hand picture, with no room for nostalgia.)


Or the fitful dreaming of sainted Irish politician John Redmond at the outbreak of World War One:

At the time, Irish nationalists followed a more complex strategy. In a sense, the war clarified the position of the Irish Parliamentary Party. It could take the opportunity to demonstrate lofty independence, or it could prove that Home Rule was fully compatible with loyalty to Crown and Empire. Redmond chose to bet heavily on the latter strategy, and given that he had extracted a Home Rule Bill from [British Prime Minister and world-class boob Herbert Henry] Asquith he may not have felt that he had much choice. He offered full Irish support for the war effort, and suggested that all [British occupying] troops be withdrawn from active service, leaving Ireland to be guarded by the Volunteers, north and south.

In retrospect this may be judged quixotic, silly, and overspontaneous ...

And of course there's the Famine, casting its long shadow over a people and their culture. Foster spends a good deal of time on this singular catastrophe and its ramifications, which included the near-death of a national identity through willing suicide:

Catholicism in the post-Famine age provided a highly organized, coherent identity that helped Irish society cope with the psychological impact of disruption. The Gaelic language was increasingly abandoned: a large proportion of emigrants came from Irish-speaking areas, and those left behind were not anxious to preserve it. Its eradication was the achievement of ambitious parents as much as of English-speaking schoolteachers.

But the story isn't all grim, naturally - winks and smiles abound, especially when Foster's unflagging research uncovers - as it does again and again - the people just being themselves, to the inevitable chagrin of outsiders:

The overwhelmingly pastoral economy was reflected in the food people ate. Access to one or two cows was general, and butter featured strongly - for cooking meat in as well as providing the milky messes described in appalled terms by late seventeenth-century travellers, and served with the aggressively unstinting hospitality that was part of the Irish ethos.

Hee. That "aggressively unstinting hospitality" usually sounded something like, "what, our food isn't good enough for the likes of you?" Foster's phrase is a good polite one; you could picture your grandmother offering "aggressively unstinting hospitality" a lot easier than you could picture her telling her sons Seamus and Eamon to feed their haughty guest some cow-patties and see how he likes that menu.


But it's those biographical footnotes that provide the most consistent fun in a long, serious book that, for all its glories, doesn't have a great deal of fun to relate. In addition to spawning some of the most hopeless loonies ever to write plays or sire American presidents, Ireland has always attracted hopeless loonies of all nationalities - by calling, as it were, to their own inner hopeless loony. Certainly this was the case with Jack Harrington, a lieutenant and sometime boon companion of Essex, who gets perfectly potted by Foster:

John Harrington (1561-1612): twice dismissed from court under charge to grow more sober; translator of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, 1591; knighted by Essex during his Irish expedition, before presenting the Queen with a chronicle of his patron's time-wasting; sought Irish employment again, under James, enclosing with his application a view of the state of Ireland in 1605 that counselled a conciliatory policy towards the natives. Said of Ireland: "I think my very genius doth in a sort lead me to that country."

Some of you may know Foster's name from his thirty-volume 100,000-page biography of Yeats, as densely and fathomlessly boring as any book could possibly be, indeed as any book about the life of Yeats perforce must be. If so, try not to hold it against him when approaching this earlier work - remind yourself of the old truism about the worker being only as good as his tools, and all that. In Modern Ireland he wrote his abiding masterpiece, a thick, packed book you'll nevertheless love and re-read, or else the question will certainly be, "and what, his book's not good enough for the likes of you?"

Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality

Our book today is Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, John Boswell's immensely researched and groundbreaking 1980 study of, as his subtitle says, "Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century." Boswell gained his greatest amount of fame (he died on Christmas Eve, 1994, from AIDS) for his 1994 book The Marriage of Likeness: Same-Sex Unions in Pre-modern Europe, in which he indulges in some dodgy textual analysis to suggest that the Catholic Church not only tolerated homosexuality but even in some cases officially recognized it. The book was born of deep-seated anger and frustration, and it duly caused those same emotions in Boswell's many friends, colleagues, and readers - mainly because it was overreaching in exactly the way our book today is not.

Instead, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality is a hugely authoritative, widely read, and persuasively argued bombshell, a loud and unswerving assertion that for most of its history, the Christian church simply didn't consider homosexuality that big a deal. Threading its way through Boswell's book (which is lucidly written but not exactly easy going for the layman, since much of its original sourcework is untranslated - Boswell was a whiz with languages - and footnotes positively abound) is the implicit assumption that one of the many classical legacies the Christian era absorbed was the comparatively laid back attitude the classical world took toward most aspects of homosexuality. In most classical societies, no furor was raised over men paying romantic and erotic attention to teenage boys - it was seen as a natural part of the socialization of those boys, since it was usually assumed that the men would be teaching the boys things while they were together (oh calm down Beepy - I mean social, cultural, and literary things) (and there was, traditionally, something emasculating seen in a man romantically besotted with a woman), provided it didn't get taken too far - the men were still expected to marry women and produce male heirs, and it was seen as a weird and dangerous subversion of the norm for the man to be the submissive member of the pair (taking it up the ass, once you're a full-grown tax-paying adult, in other words, was seen as weird).

Boswell is on largely comfortable ground while he's dealing with classical and even late classical antiquity. It's only when he gets to the Middle Ages that he starts to encounter more formalized language in his sources, and it's here he starts needing to organize himself for the massive, systemic persecutions he knows are coming:

It can hardly be maintained that the relatively indulgent attitude adopted by prominent churchmen of the early Middle Ages toward homosexual behavior was due to ignorance of it. It is in the first place not ignored but treated lightly. In the second place, there is evidence of gay sexuality throughout the period, despite the disappearance of a subculture. The barbarians themselves were not necessarily strangers to gay sexuality. Aristotle observed that the Celts publicly honored homosexual relations, Strabo that they considered it a dishonor to decline a homosexual liaison, and Diodorus Siculus that they were "absolutely addicted to homosexual intercourse." Similar observations were made about other groups.

And something of the scope of Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality can be seen in the broad extent of the sources Boswell cites. All throughout his book, he deals not only with Christian attitudes toward homosexuality but Islamic ones as well:

Homosexual love imagery was a standard currency of Islamic mystical writings both in and out of Spain. Many of the authors of gay erotic poetry on the Iberian peninsula were teachers of the Qur'an, religious leaders, or judges; almost all wrote conventional religious verse as well as love poetry.

And of course Amis and Amiloun gets a workout - Boswell accurately reports that the abiding love of its title characters was celebrated, not condemned, throughout the Christian world. Boswell's biggest weakness, unfortunately, was an ongoing almost willful misunderstanding of what allegory is and is not, how people indulge in it and how they don't (his was the least allegorical mind imaginable), and as he himself elsewhere was fond of pointing out, there are none so blind as them that will not see ... but then, readers of this book (and despite its formidable textual apparatus, you are all urged to read it) shouldn't be coming to it for sensitive aesthetic interpretations of the works it considers, but rather the sociological stunners Boswell derives from them:

As if from nowhere, love in a thousand guises invaded the landscapes, townships, and monasteries of in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and its warmth revived from long hibernation the fiery passions of ancient Europe. It transformed the ascetic spirituality of the desert fathers into the passionate mysticism of Saint Bernard, breached the barriers of Basil's isolated monastic cells with the tender friendships of Saint Anselm and Aelred, dissolved patristic theology of purely functional sexual relations into the Christian romance that seemed to sweep all before it in the High Middle Ages.



It's a slightly idealized painting of what was going on during the so-called "renaissance of the twelfth century," but by the time readers get that far, they'll be very nearly convinced. The only point where Boswell falters, the only place where he shows the germ of the overreaching that will get him into so much trouble in his more famous book, comes when he attempts to dice logic with none other than Saint Thomas Aquinas. As some of you may know - and as generations of students have learned to their dismay - this simply can't be done (or at least the logician who can do it hasn't been born yet - maybe when we make first contact with the Vulcans ...). When Boswell tries it, he's reduced to intentionally misconstruing context and very nearly misreading the Latin:

In the end, Aquinas admits more or less frankly that his characterization of homosexual acts as "unnatural" is a concession to popular sentiment and parlance. Since theologically sins are necessarily "unnatural," it is simply redundant to argue that homosexuality is sinful because it is "unnatural"; homosexual acts would have to be shown to be sinful apart from their "unnaturalness" to be immoral from a theological point of view; but Aquinas could bring to bear no argument against homosexual behavior which would make it more serious than overeating an admitted, moreover, that homosexual desire was the result of a "natural" condition, which would logically have made behavior resulting from it not only inculpable but "good."

A disquisition on Aquinas and the "natural" would consume the resources of the entire Internet, but suffice it to say, Boswell is in this passage on very weak ground. Aquinas condemns homosexuality not because it's what the gals on The View are doing but because as far as his education was concerned, the Bible condemns homosexuality. Fortunately, Boswell regains his lost ground almost immediately, with a spirited discussion of the history of mis-translation of key Biblical and classical terms relating to homosexuality ... a discussion that'll leave you wondering just how much the late Medieval church understood about what it was increasingly condemning.

Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality is an important little revolution of a book, one man's passionate attempt to shake some sense into the religion he himself professed (Boswell was, despite many and lengthy attempts by friends of his during his days as a used bookstore-trolling Harvard student to talk him out of it, a convert to Catholicism), to say to that church and the big intolerant world of which it was a microcosm, "I myself am homosexual, and I will use the brain God gave me - and the texts on which your beliefs are based - to prove categorically that this is no evil thing."

Boswell's later work evoked a great deal of pointed textual criticism of the type he would have loved, which only adds to the sadness of his death. But if any part of his subject interests you, do what he would have done: find your nearest gay and lesbian bookstore and search its shelves for treasures. This book is one of them.